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2016 MFA thesis exhibition II

The Department of Fine Arts and UWAG present the second of two thesis exhibitions by MFA candidates from the graduate program in Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo. MFA Thesis gives the campus and community-at-large an opportunity to see the end result of two years of intensive research and studio production by emerging visual artists.

Gallery OneAislinn ThomasDup-boug-a-dad

Dup-boug-a-dad is a video installation that is interested in bringing together and exploring different ways of being in the world. Writes the artist of this work:

My friend David loves cheerleading. Living in rural Nova Scotia, as he does, his main access to the sport is YouTube. The footage in Dup-boug-a-dad was taken when David visited Kitchener-Waterloo in 2015 and practiced with the University of Waterloo cheerleading teams.

My friend David loves to sing. Being deaf, as he is, he sings in his own language. The song in Dup-boug-a-dad seems to be, at least in part, about lifting a cheerleader up with one arm. He sang it while “hearing” his voice for the first time (that we know of). Standing on a platform that vibrated in response to the sound he made, his voice was translated into felt, tactile sensation.

Gallery TwoJennifer AkkermansYou Can Never Go Home

In the summer of 2014, Jennifer Akkermans packed everything she owned into her car and moved from Calgary to Waterloo. Since then, she has been attempting to build a home for herself in Ontario. You Can Never Go Home is a physical manifestation of this process. Torn between remembering her prairie home and attempting to acclimatize to a new place, Akkermans uses herself as a case study. Like some of the artworks in the exhibition, the process is incomplete. The obsessiveness and anxiety of the installation speaks to the discomfort and sense of discovery at the heart of her transition.

Airstream TrailerAnna van Milligendollhouse

dollhouse comes from two places—on one hand, an intense sensitivity to the continued existence of sexism and sexist oppression; and on the other, an affinity for pink, pretty, plastic things. The result is a hyperfeminine fantasy space, an intimate domestic interior blanketed in peach, pink, and baby blue. Constructed within the gutted shell of a vintage Airstream trailer, a series of compartments and alcoves display a peculiar collection of found, altered, and hand-made objects laid out in shrine-like arrangements, as if for worship—or perhaps illicit consumption. Torn between a desire to touch and a fear of spoiling the virginal purity of their surroundings, visitors are simultaneously invited in and made to feel like intruders in this strangely beautiful, perversely fascinating space.